How Open is Elden Ring?
Nathan Schmidt, Contributing Editor
FromSoftware likes to do this: there’s the start of the game, and then there’s the start of the game. In Dark Souls, there’s the Northern Undead Asylum, and then a little trip to the Firelink Shrine, where you face your first real options for which direction to explore next. Bloodborne starts you off in Iosefka’s Clinic, and after a little walking around and a more-or-less guaranteed trip to, aherm, somewhere else, you get to open the great big gate and glimpse your first seriously Gothic archway. In this regard, Elden Ring sticks with the formula. You wake up in some musty old cave with a cryptic message in it, and then you have to wander around for a while—maybe even more than usual—before you really get out into the world at the Site of Grace that is so aptly named The First Step.
First step, indeed.
And what a first step it is. I’ve seen less impressive vistas from the top of real-life mountains. I actually gasped a little bit when I caught my first sight of the fields and forests, the crumbling ruins and the giant golden tree hanging over it all. Hours later (precisely one Margit and one Godrick later), I stepped out into Liurna of the Lakes, and it happened again. I instantly understood why one of our editors, Roger Whitson, asked in our Elden Ring Slack channel: “Does this game ever end?”
It does, of course. Apparently, for the highly motivated, it can end in as little as twenty minutes. But for all its size, I actually have some reservations about how “open” Elden Ring actually is.
Of course, Elden Ring has a number of characteristics that I’ve come to associate with open world games. It has a huge map that you can place markers on, and while your average player probably won’t find a way to go everywhere on the map right from the beginning, you certainly have plenty of room to explore and poke around. FromSoft is very good at posting signs that say “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” but to their credit there are ways to get yourself transported all over the map, even into places you definitely shouldn’t be.
Intimidating landscapes abound. Or am I just playing Bloodborne by the time I get to Volcano Manor?
That’s when I started asking myself how open this game actually is. Don’t get me wrong: running past overpowered enemies is a very important tactic in pretty much any FromSoft game, and while my exploration may be a little bit less attentive with a dozen reanimating skeleton warriors on my ass, there are plenty of hard parts of the map that I’ve gotten a good look at before some giant dragon swooped down and swallowed my crispy Tarnished bacon. In other words, there are places you should go, places you could go, and places you really probably shouldn’t go. Is that an open world?
To which one might retort: “That’s just how it is! Most people don’t boot up Breath of the Wild and zoom straight for Ganon’s Castle. Are you saying that every game with any kind of environmental gatekeeping in it isn’t really an open world?” Well, yes and no. Not every game is Minecraft, no, and not every game should be. But there are a lot of ways for a great big game to scale with the player’s progression. Breath of the Wild actually has one of the more sophisticated ways of handling this, in my opinion, where the gatekeeping is managed more by item crafting and acquisition than by enemy difficulty or player skill. You can always do the Bethesda thing, too, making the strength of the enemies and the level of the loot scale with the character, which certainly provides a balanced experience, albeit one that I would argue gets much more repetitive than my many, many attempts to kill Rykard, Lord of Blasphemy in Elden Ring.
While a couple of places I’ve tried to get to in my seventy-plus hours in Elden Ring so far have been gated by items (Grand Lift of Dectus) or by environmental hazards (Caelid), by far the most common type of gatekeeping has been tied to character level: again, “I could be here, but should I be here?” Oh, I hit that guy with my +12 weapon and it took down 1% of his health bar. I guess this is not yet the party I was looking for. In many ways, Elden Ring is as open as you’re willing to let it be; or, to put it another way, it’s open to letting you die.
Environmental hazards. Speaking my truth: I avoided Caelid for a long time because it was just too freaky and gross.
I was thinking about this when I was getting frustrated with fighting the boss who is the literal gatekeeper for the capital city of Leyndell. An NPC who generally gave out reputable information had told me to go here, but this giant person with a lightning spear on a fire breathing horse kept trouncing me, over and over again. This happened to the point where I started thinking to myself, “Well, I haven’t really looked around Caelid all that much, and I’ve heard about a mountain topped with a place called Volcano Manor that’s not too far from here.” As I rode away in shame from my fire breathing white whale towards the mountain, I realized that this game is really an exercise—in many ways a master class—in making the player feel like they have agency. There is, indeed, a giant world in which you have many different options for exploration. But the idea of places you could go versus places you should go actually makes for a, dare I say it, relatively linear experience. Gideon Ofnir, “The All-Knowing,” told me to go to Leyndell, but the Draconic Tree Sentinel told me that I had some other errands to run before that appointment.
In a lot of what I’ve read about Elden Ring, this ability to walk away from a too-challenging encounter to do something else is lauded as something that makes the game more approachable than its Dark Souls predecessors. For the most part I agree, though I think the simplified weapon upgrade system and the plentiful smithing stones are actually the biggest factors that lower the difficulty curve. However, I’m convinced that this ability to just walk away is also a clever piece of misdirection that makes the player believe that they are in control of the situation when they are in fact headed in the direction that the game expects them to go. Yes, I did have the choice to go to Volcano Manor or Caelid, and yes, I am generalizing my own play experience while knowing that there are people who more or less professionally break these games on YouTube. I’m not saying that there are no choices or that there are no exceptions to my experience where somebody min-maxes their build so hard that they crush the Draconic Tree Sentinel immediately. However, when I compare my experience in this game to my experience in other games that most would characterize as “open worlds”—Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, and sure, Minecraft (why not?)—I feel like it becomes important to differentiate between an open world game and a game with a very big map.
Proof that I eventually made it to Leyndell.
Here’s what I think: we talk a lot in RPGs about the sandbox versus the railroad. Do players have a great big space to play in and build whatever they want, or are they following a path that’s been laid out for them in advance? Now, Elden Ring never claimed to be a pure sandbox-type experience, and I’m sure glad it’s not, because games that don’t give me a specific thing to aim at often make me feel, well, aimless. It isn’t a railroad, either—players have the ability to make genuinely meaningful choices, though I think the most consequential choices are actually more about one’s preferred character build than they are about which direction to go next. Rather than describing Elden Ring as an open world game, though, I would describe it more as a giant three-dimensional puzzle, like the homage to George R. R. Martin shown below. You can choose which parts you want to work on first, and if you get stuck on something, you can start on another part and work your way back to the thing that was tripping you up—but no matter how many different choices you make, you’re still doing the same puzzle. Your choices aren’t unlimited; rather, you have the appearance of multiple paths that are intentionally limited by the parameters of the structure you’re working your way through.
Image credit: Wrebbit3d Puzzles
As in the famous story of Shigero Miyamoto’s inspiration for The Legend of Zelda coming from his experience turning over rocks as a boy, Elden Ring gives you plenty of things to turn over, comb through, and poke at. But calling it an open world game actually does a disservice to its carefully crafted structure. On my way to Volcano Manor, I found myself standing on one side of an untraversable broken bridge, only to find myself on the other side of it about five hours later. Is that an open world? Or is it a world that’s closed off...in the right ways?
